Large commercial aircraft have a wide range of exterior lights. Examples of exterior lights are landing and take off lights, taxi and runway turn off lights, white strobe anti-collision lights, red beacon lights, navigation lights, wing and engine scan lights, logo lights, cargo loading lights, and emergency lights. With the consistent development of new aircraft models, there is a constant need to adapt the whole exterior lighting system to the new models and to constantly re-design all the light units. This re-design is challenging, because the resulting light intensity distributions have to satisfy Federal Aviation Regulation (FAR) requirements, quasi-standard recommendations, aircraft manufacture demands, etc. In this environment, it is desirable to have as much flexibility with respect to the light unit design as possible.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide an exterior aircraft light unit that helps in increasing the flexibility for the overall exterior lighting design.